Addressing Africa's health workforce crisis - The McKinsey Quarterly - africa health workforce - Public Sector

Millions of people across sub-Saharan Africa suffer needlessly because they cannot obtain medical care from trained workers. Fully 820,000 additional doctors and nurses are needed to provide the region with even the most basic health services. The money to hire, train, and sustain such an increase won't be available in the foreseeable future. Even if funding materialized, 600 additional medical and nursing schools would be needed to fill the gap, and it would take more than two decades to train the requisite number of professionals.
To ameliorate the problem in the coming decade, countries in Africa should build systems based on thoughtful ratios between professional and paraprofessional workers. Governments can’t do so alone; the development community and the private sector also have roles to play.

Exhibit 1: Sub-Saharan Africa has far fewer health workers per capita than the World Health Organization recommends.
Exhibit 2: Sub-Saharan Africa will require an additional 820,000 health workers to meet the World Health Organization’s benchmark for health workers per capita by 2030.
Exhibit 3: Most of the funds available for spending on health care in 2015 will go toward maintaining today’s median health spending per capita.
Exhibit 4: Filling the gap with a partly paraprofessional workforce would be significantly more cost effective than traditional approaches.

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